Talia Keinan’s solo show expands the crack between the real and the imaginary. The space she creates beckons the viewer to roam inside it as if in a dream, to linger meditatively in the in-between moments whose ephemerality is palpable, and to gather the impressions that emerge slowly and are absorbed back in. These are the edges of vision that Keinan wishes to awaken.
The medium of drawing stands at the core of her work, as a daily practice that attracts images and experiences from everyday life and her immediate surroundings – one based on the attentive observation of the seemingly trivial and insignificant. Keinan shifts between drawings to video and light projections, toying with the tangibility of the visions she conjures.
The first hall is dominated by the presence of a bright shape that appears on two adjacent walls, shifting between two mesmerizing images: in the first, it seems to form a floating table while the dark stone on top of it becomes weightless. In the other, it turns into a shining window, like an opening to another dimension, while a drawing in white chalk appears behind as its faint echo.
Keinan creates an intermediate world that is perhaps perceived by the imagination, but its tangibility is felt. In this "world of hovering images, suspended in the air," the imagination brings together the inconceivable and the perceptible. A portal of sorts opens in the far wall of the gallery through which one can vanish into the unknown. On the other side of the hall, the darkness becomes a hanging veil, like a nocturnal screen suspended by a projected rock, whose entire essence is nothing but light.
In his book, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, James Hillman wishes to remind us of the power of the imagination to bring us closer to the inner beauty of the world: "That particular soul spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form (….) More – our imaginative recognition, the childlike act of imagining the world, animates the world and returns it to soul."
Keinan creates with attention and sensitivity to the drawing process itself, through which she wishes to allow the essence of things to reveal themselves to her. Her affinity with the spirit of the East is evident in how her images take shape – striving towards a distillation that alludes to something beyond the visible, a secret that reveals itself slowly, like a key, a path, or a gate that carries us to a vague sensory memory. So little is required to trigger the imagination; listening to the image, its quality and its particular frequency.
The warehouse that hovers in the middle of the space is comprised of a group of drawings that Keinan gathered into a hanging tent of sorts. Each side is characterized by a different mood: on the dark front side, traces of images dissolve into the darkness, like shadows or echoes of phantoms wishing to be heard through the paper windows; on the light back side, a climbing plant spreads across the pieces of paper, connecting them with its growth lines.
In her drawings, Keinan offers us an experience of wonderment, an open and curious observation that lends itself to nuances and subtleties. For a brief moment, a drawing materializes out of shadows and illuminated shapes whose details slowly come together while wandering through the space.
"If you looked clearly to the four directions of the sky, could you be without knowledge?" Lao Tzu
